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John Hutton, MD, Director, Reading & Literacy Discovery Center:
"The traditional approach to reading has been described as a 'wait to fail' approach. But then, children end up in kindergarten, and a lot of them are discovered to be behind. They're increasingly at risk for falling farther behind in the coming disillusion with school and dropping out.
Clinically, our work at Cincinnati Children's Reading & Literacy Discovery Center focuses on identifying children at risk of potential reading difficulties and then administering evidence-based treatments.
Research side, our work breaks into preventative strategies, which are in the 0-5 space, and then also, for older kids trying to again, figure out how can we identify children as early as possible, especially children from underserved backgrounds.
For about 18 years, I ran a children's bookstore here in Cincinnati, and I got very, very interested in how well children's books convey information to families.
We developed a book called "The Reading House," which is a regular children's book. It's 14 pages long. One of my goals is to make sort of the screening process stealthy and as unobtrusive as possible. And so, we developed a screening tool based on "The Reading House," which is a nine-item, scripted survey.
The person administering the script first gives the book to the child and says, 'Can you show me the front cover of the book?' And then the child will point at that. Then, they really just go through, and without reading the text, they ask questions about each spread of the book. 'Can you show me words you could read? The sounds letters make?' Alliteration, rhyming, blending of sounds, and then the last is vocabulary.
The last thing the child does in the book, which is one of my favorite things, is we actually ask them to write their name on the back of the book. And the child really thinks that's fun. And they try to spell their name. But what we're doing here is trying to access: Can they write their name, which is a really important skill, which we know is related to reading readiness and subsequent reading ability, called emergent writing.
Through the screening, which is, again, nine items, we end up with a score. From there, depending on the child's age, 3 to 4 and then 4 and up, that maps to performance level.
And then, that helps a provider, whether it's a pediatrician or a preschool teacher or someone in the community to figure out, you know, where is this child in terms of their skills, and then, importantly, you know, what should we do to help them?
It's really the first tool of its kind that's a direct screening measure, something that actually involves the child in the process. It's also relatively fast. It takes, on average, about 5 minutes.
The study we just published established high correlations that were all statistically significant between Reading House scores and each cognitive measure. Then, also, importantly, scores on The Reading House correlated significantly with measures of cortical thickness, which is the gray matter thickness in the brain.
One of the things that we think is really important about using MRI in this kind of research is it really helps to reinforce the idea that reading is more than something that's just a nice thing to do if there's time with children. There really is something that's got a neurological basis that involves a functional network in the brain. And the differences really start to show up in children at a very young age.
For those of you interested in more information in "The Reading House," whether the book or the screening tool, or if you have any questions or feedback, we encourage you to visit the Cincinnati Children's virtual exhibit free resources button. Click that, order free copies or just get any information you think would be helpful. And we appreciate your time and interest in "The Reading House." Thank you.
